Sustainability of Rural Tourism and Promotion of Local Development

Since the 1970s but with greater intensity in the 1980s, strong, social, economic, and cultural transformations have led to the post-Fordist or post-productivist countryside determining what researchers identify as “rural restructuring” [...]

Sustainable Geographical Changes in Rural Areas: Key Paths, Orientations and Limits

Rural differentiation processes have formed the backbone of rural studies. Owing to the strength of rural–urban and local–global relationships, the theoretical approaches to rural restructuring in the Anglo-Saxon world and new rurality in Latin America only have a limited capacity to explain contemporary global phenomena of rural spaces. Due to this, transverse theoretical and methodological approaches have emerged to explain social, environmental and spatial (rural) processes. Here, a new approach is proposed called the individual–global field, based on the individual–global binary category to substitute the traditional relevance of the locality–community–globality association This new approach tries to reinvigorate rural geography in a more flexible way, based on minor theory, to adapt to all the phenomena that can occur globally. In any case, various spatial planes are proposed, dominated by specific socioeconomic processes on which the rural individual would move.

Leveraging land values for rural development in China after the Sichuan earthquake

Since the late 1990s, rural residential land consolidation projects have propelled a wave of rural restructuring across China. Characterized by the creation of concentrated villages, land consolidation is seen as a means of both improving land-use efficiency and promoting rural development. But residential concentration is often funded through the commodification of rural land – a trend that became particularly clear in rural Chengdu after the Wenchuan earthquake. This article explores the implications of land-based rural reconstruction in Chengdu. Drawing on a comparison of three adjacent communities in peri-urban Chengdu, the article argues that the tactics adopted by local leaders in their efforts to generate funds through land consolidation can best be characterized as a process of leveraging rural land values. This leveraging entails not only a risk of failure, but also a diversion of public funds towards projects that enhance the attractiveness of land to urban investors, a removal of control over land from the hands of rural residents, and a deepening of inequalities across communities.

Neglected idle rural residential land (IRRL): A challenge in achieving rural restructuring in metropolitan suburbs

<p>Idle rural residential land (IRRL) is an important manifestation of changes in the human-land relationship during rural development. Studies on this topic are an important field in the study of sustainable land use, but quantitative analyses of IRRL in the academic community are still lacking. In this paper, we take the Pinggu, which has rapid urbanization, to analyse the spatial differentiation of IRRL and explore the spatial differentiation in the impact of different factors on IRRL. Results showed that IRRL was a common phenomenon in metropolitan suburbs with rapid urbanization. It had a spatial pattern of "one belt, three cores" in Pinggu, and its scale decreased from southeast to northwest. Industrial areas, semi-mountain ecotourism areas and urban fringe areas were the high-incidence areas of IRRL, while the idle rate of rural residential land in mountainous areas and plain agricultural areas was relatively low. The IRRL was the result of a combination of different factors, and there were differences among the different factors and regions. The transfer of rural labour, non-agriculturalization of industrial structure and mode of production and lifestyle caused by urbanization and industrialization were the major driving forces, and the lagging village planning and imperfect land use system increased the risk of IRRL. Our study contributes to filling the gap in quantitative research on IRRL to enrich the land use research system by exploring the interaction between humans and land in rural areas and thus has significance for rural restructuring and sustainable use of land in China.</p>